KUCHING: Sarawak timber tycoons who own private jets have been advised to refrain from flying to ebola afflicted countries in Western Africa for the time being to prevent the epidemic from spreading to the country.
Datuk Dr Jerip Susil
State Assistant Minister of Public Health Datuk Dr Jerip Susil said even the national carrier Mas had withheld its flights to these countries.
“We would like to advice our timber players from Sarawak who own private jets to refrain from travelling to those countries in Western Africa which are now afflicted by the deadly disease,” Dr Jerip told The Borneo Post here yesterday.
He said the people must take precautions to ensure that the state was safe from the dreaded disease.
“We have our past bad experiences such as the Coxsackie outbreak in the late 90’s and the SAR outbreak recently. So we have to be careful all the time,” added Dr Jerip.
He also reiterated that the Ministry of Health (MOH) had issued a directive to Malaysians not to travel to the affected countries.
“MOH has also issued a directive that those who have been to the some of the African countries with symptoms of the disease to undergo quarantine,” he said.
Dr Jerip was commenting on the World Health Organisation (WHO) latest report that West Africa’s Ebola epidemic is now considered as an “extraordinary event” and deemed an international health risk. The Geneva-based UN health agency said the possible consequences of a further international spread of the outbreak, which has killed almost 1,000 people in four West African countries, were “particularly serious” in view of the virulence of the virus.
“A coordinated international response is essential to stop and reverse the international spread of Ebola,” WHO said in a statement after a two-day meeting of its emergency committee on Ebola.
“The outbreak is moving faster than we can control it,” the WHO’s director-general Margaret Chan told reporters on a telephone briefing from the WHO’s Geneva headquarters.
The agency said that, while all states with Ebola transmission – so far Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone – should declare a national emergency, there should be no general ban on international travel or trade.
Ebola has no proven cures and there is no vaccine to prevent infection, so treatment focuses on alleviating symptoms such as fever, vomiting and diarrhoea .
Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s head of health security, stressed that, with the right measures to deal with infected people, the spread of Ebola – which is transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids – could be stopped.
“This is not a mysterious disease. This is an infectious disease that can be contained. It is not a virus that is spread through the air,” he told reporters.
Fukuda said it was important that anyone known to have Ebola should be immediately isolated and treated and kept in isolation for 30 days.